Arts Advocates: Steven Lam
Steven Lam
LEGACY BUILDER
Q&A with Stephen Lam
Artist, curator and educational leader Steven Lam M.F.A. ’04, is the dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts, known as CalArts. A mentee and friend of late artist, activist and UC Irvine professor emerita Yong Soon Min, Lam recently launched a memorial fund at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts to ensure Min’s legacy continues among future generations of art students.
Q. What was most influential about your experience as an M.F.A. student at UCI?
SL: UCI faculty made me want to be an educator. They are legendary. I still have notes from my critiques with Catherine Lord, Simon Leung, Daniel Joseph Martinez and I find myself parroting back what they said to my own students. The feedback from Kevin Appel, Connie Samaras, Antoinette Lafarge, Miles Coolidge, Ulysses Jenkins, Lorraine O’Grady, Bruce Yonemoto was incredibly generative. Plus I had the opportunity to sit in classes with French philosopher Jacques Derrida. These were significant voices specifically working around the intersection of art and politics, and they taught me to think about identity, critique and agency as an artist.
Q. Why was it important to you to launch the Yong Soon Min Endowed Memorial Fund, supporting student scholarships, in her honor?
SL: I’m so grateful for the mentors I had at UCI, and I was so lucky that Yong Soon Min and I were able to keep in touch after I graduated. She was proud of her students and insisted each generation meet other former students and mentees. She created a circle linking all of us together. I’ve come to believe that’s what pedagogy is: it’s about not being alone and realizing that your work, your ideas, who you are, are part of a rich history — an ancestry — of people who have come before. This scholarship fund will not only honor her name but help continue her circle at UCI, so emerging students can be part of Yong Soon Min’s legacy.
Q. What do you enjoy most about today’s rising generation of artists?
SL: They’re idealistic and practical at the same time. Emerging artists are able to put many worlds into one: their expectations of where art can be and what the field can do is incredibly vast, whether that’s doing social justice work, public art, working in the academy, or collaborating with others. They can layer their research with a variety of different technological outputs and histories. For example, my students love environmental philosophy, and they also love indie videotapes. One can call that fragmentation, or perhaps that’s the expansion of the field. How great is that?
Q. The theme of this issue is Arts & Identity. From your perspective, what role does identity play in creating and engaging with art?
SL: When I attended UCI, “post-identity” was in the air among the mainstream artworld. As if considering one’s racialization or subordination was no longer relevant or that differences should be negated because “everyone is considered equal.” The faculty were radically suspicious and critical and, perhaps, prescient with those maneuvers. If we don't know who we are, how can we understand our role in shaping the world? How can we understand how power reproduces itself? To me, identity is not just about single issues like race or gender. Yong Soon Min taught me that identity also includes the aftermath of tumultuous geopolitical conditions like war or displacement. I believe identity is the product of multiple culminating forces inclusive of social, legal and psychological perspectives, and art practice is a means to name, inform, consider, disrupt and materialize the complexities of identity in poetic and transformative ways.
To donate or learn more about the Yong Soon Min Memorial Fund, contact Sarah Strozza, executive director of development, at sstrozza@uci.edu.
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